Was I procrastinating? I'll get back to you...

I had barely even begun my blog when I went and got bored of it. My last post was six months ago. SIX whole months! That's half a year! One twentieth of a decade! Over 0.017 of my life ago! Well, it seems slightly less bad then. In truth, not a lot happened. I got a tiny bit older, did a bit more to the house, visited a few places. All in all, a pleasant time. Anyhoo, on with my thoughts...

When I was a wee scallywag, I absolutely detested reading. When I say reading, I mean reading for leisure as opposed to by necessity. Obviously I was able to read signs and school stuff, because otherwise I would now be monumentally under-educated or dead from a failure to comprehend messages such as "Danger! High Voltage!" and "Do not stick your head out of the window of a moving train". Anyhow, reading for pleasure was not for me, as I did not find the act pleasurable. Call it a lack of patience or a symptom of today's youth and their inability to carry out a task in which gratification is not instant (although as I near the age of 30, referring to myself as "youth" seems somewhat optimistic).

After several years of failed coaxing from my mum, with such literary gifts as "Around the World in Eighty Days" and "The Neverending Story" (of which the original written version is far superior to the film, I must say in retrospect) I finally discovered the works of Iain Banks via his somewhat darkly disturbing novel, The Wasp Factory.

Holy cow! Books can say swears? Books can deal with odd people doing weird things? Now things were getting interesting. After reading this, I realised that books are actually pretty fun, and I felt all rebellious, because surely my teachers/parents etc had wanted me to read solely to improve my moral and ethical worth as a human bean. Instead, here I was reading stuff like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Dice Man. Morally reprehensible, every last page.

After a time, I got to thinking that I should probably try to read proper books too. I greatly enjoyed futuristic ponderances such as 1984 and Brave New World (two sides of the same coin, I have always thought), sober classics, world fiction, Booker prize winning stuff. My mind expanded and I felt very smug with myself. I could now reference things in conversation in the manner of the smartest of arses.

And then one day I got bored of it all. Nobody is actually impressed if I say I enjoy early 19th century Russian literature. I do enjoy it, but stating this fact fails to have the desired effect upon my audience. They are, quite selfishly, not swept up in a wave of adoration and respect. Ultimately, personal experience led me to realising that a lot of people attach a lot of their intellectual self-image to the books they have read. War and Peace? Read it in a weekend. Byron? I shit it, mate. etc etc.

This is now a pet peeve. Why should I be impressed by a person's reading list. It's not like they wrote it or anything. I've read things before and thoroughly failed to get the point, and I'm sure everyone else has too. It took me years to figure out that Animal Farm was all about Communism. I figured it was just about some unruly pigs.

So in conclusion, I no longer care so much for highbrow books. They are often a difficult waste of time. And that, my small group of readers, is how I have justified purchasing twenty second hand Deep Space Nine paperbacks in one go. If you're going to read, it might as well be something you enjoy.